Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the nobler satire: "I always picture lawyers and clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of engine for quenching money thirst--the one row, the clients, always passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row standing and handing each other buckets or purses full," said I. I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own--for he is a small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say to the following ideas. "The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of _export_ trade only; the attic salt _they_ have a taste for, is that which BENKELSZOON used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided Erasmus, in consideration of _his_ salt (of a better quality), with a statue (he never _ate_ salt, by the way), yet I think this was excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to the fish-curer in question. Even CAMPE, who by no means classes the inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I say that the German is really being made something of at the present day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow--a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful follies, who knows _edible_ from _cogitable_ matter (when he sees it), and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important) from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of any poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's own heart-strings--and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any printing except calico-printing." Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he was dead.[8]